It seems like such a simple thing. When writing a basic sentence, you end it with a period (also known as a full-stop).

Obviously, when asking a question you use a question mark (?), and you follow up an exclamation with an exclamation point (!). You might be leading into a list of items and need a colon (:), or be writing dialogue that drifts off so that you need an ellipsis (…).

But, usually, almost all the time, you’re going to end your sentences with a period. That’s that little dot at the end.

I mention this because, more and more often, I see e-mails and blog posts chock-full of pretty much every other possible means of ending a sentence, with nary a period to be seen. Really, though, it’s simple. Approximately 98% of the time, you should use a period to end a sentence. Every now and again, for emphasis or as a means of signifying that you’re asking a question, you will need to use something else, but you shouldn’t let the others become a habit.

I’ll admit that I do this too often, myself. I’m far to fond of using ellipses at the ends of my sentences, especially when making suggestions in an e-mail. I like to think that it makes me seem less bossy that way, that I’m leaving the final decision up to the reader. But, really, I’m just fooling myself. I know perfectly well that what that really does is make me a sloppy writer. And that’s not usually the impression I want to make….

Did anybody else read Copyblogger today? Brian Clark collected a fantastic group of quotes demonstrating how even the brightest people can lack foresight in matters of creativity, and reject things that would have made them (more?) famous, rich, or renowned. His point is that you shouldn’t make assumptions, but my take?

Rejection happens to the best of us. Everybody gets rejected sometimes. Your book manuscript comes back with “No, thanks” scrawled across it. Your dream date sneers at you when you work up the courage to offer dinner and a movie. Your child shouts “No!” when you ask for a hug. No life, no matter how golden and blessed, comes without someone saying no at some point or another.

Those quotes that Brian pulled together are fabulous because they have inspiration and hope built right in. If people could say no to the Beatles and give the idea that started Fedex a grade of a C, well, we’re in good company. Apple computer did turn out to be a success, and I think we’ve all managed to come up with a few things to invent since 1899.

The trick to success is to not listen when people tell you something won’t work. Especially when it’s something you believe in.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

President Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Sorry, folks, no Mangled Monday post today for two reasons. One, it’s taken me over 24 hours to get this far into writing a post, but two, mostly, because I have a fever today and am not thinking as clearly as I need to be to write a post worth your time. (grin.) Next week, I promise!

I’ve talked about not over-using the same, tired words, which ties into other, earlier posts that stressed the importance of a good vocabulary. Having a healthy variety of words to play with can only help the quality of your writing, right?

Well, yes, but here’s the Catch-22. I’m sure that you folks would all recognize A+ words like “prodigious,” “ratiocination,” “loquacious,” or whatever, because clearly you are all wise and erudite people, but . . . what if your readers aren’t familiar with them? Does it make you sound pretentious and too out-of-touch? Does it make you sound like you’re showing off?

Too many “big words” may make your writing obscure, rather than clear, elitist rather than elevated, smug rather than smart.

It is a fine line to walk. I can (and do) recommend that you foster as large a vocabulary as your brain can absorb, but there are occasionally problems about actually using it. I don’t know that I can actually tell you why, however. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, where showing off is frowned upon, even over something as simple as vocabulary and correct grammatical structure. Or perhaps there’s a desire to fit in, to talk like everyone else who’s not an English professor. Or maybe it’s just that simple words like “good,” and “pretty” are just that? Simple. Straight-forward. Solid, Anglo-Saxon, strong words . . . not fancy like the Latin-based ones.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to knowing your audience. (How many times have you heard that, huh?) If you are writing to a group of English professors, darn it, buff that vocabulary to a eye-searing shine and take it for a spin around the block to see what it can do. If you’re writing to a group of 10-year olds, though, it’s probably best to leave the souped-up vocabulary in the garage and bring out the Schwinn instead. But leave off the training wheels. You wouldn’t encourage a 10-year old to try riding his bicycle along a super highway, but you want him to be smart enough to recognize the cool, mind-stretching words when he sees them, so don’t be afraid to use some words that he might not know.

Because, here’s the other thing–never talk down to your audience. You might not want to pitch your writing style so high above their heads that you can’t connect to the reader, but there’s nothing wrong with making them stretch just a little to absorb your wisdom.

It’s a fine line, but who ever said that keeping it simple was a bad thing?

So, Brad was wondering what words in titles need to be capitalized.

This is actually one of the topics I keep meaning to write about, so I’m glad he asked. Here’s a quick overview for you:

• You capitalize the first and last words, all the nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and any prepositions of 5 letters or more.

• You do NOT capitalize articles, conjunctions, or the word “to” when it’s part of an infinitive … unless they’re the first word.

Basically, what I was taught in second grade? You capitalize the “important” words–the ones that give the title substance–and leave the unimportant ones lowercase.

Some examples? Let’s see, just looking at my nearest bookcases:

• The Game of Kings
• Legacy of the Dead
• New Pathways for Sock Knitters
• Jeeves in the Morning
• Woe Is I
• Waiting for the Weekend
• The Most Beautiful House in the World
• Pride and Prejudice 

The trick, though, is that different rules apply depending on where you live and the medium which you are titling. A book in England, for example, may have different capitalization applied than a newspaper article in the United States, which may use different rules than a blog post … just about anywhere.

You can read more thorough instructions here, here, and here.

I’ve got an object lesson for you today, so let’s start with a story:

I recently bought a new camera (a Nikon D40 DSLR, which I love, thank you), but I’m irritated with Adorama camera. Even though we’re in different states, they charged me sales tax. I sent an e-mail to amazon.com who agreed that it should not have been charged, but that I’d need to contact Adorama directly, which I did. Now, I’m all kinds of happy with my actual order and I can’t fault their order fulfillment, but . . . my God, who do they have doing their customer service??

This is the reply I got back (with misspellings, bad typing, and multi-colors intact):

I am really sorry, but every one have to pay sales taxes, the difference on how much, it will depend on where the shipping address is.

For example I have an overseas credit card, when I use it here in NY either if I choose pick it up at the store or that they deliver it to me , I always pay 8.13%.

Also you please check Sales taxes in the United States – New Jersey has a 7% state sales tax. This is split as 3.5% for the State, and 3.5% for the municipality.

Um, ack! Completely disregarding the lack of a helpful response (i.e., the answer I want (grin)), this is one of the most badly-written, appallingly atrocious e-mails I have ever received. Really. Ever.

Think about how badly this makes Adorama look. I’m not happy about the $45 sales tax, but I am absolutely appalled at the verbal skills of this person from “On line customer services,” who doesn’t even seem to know that “online” is one word, or that titles and department names are usually capitalized. (The fact that she so nicely/patronizingly gave me a link to Wikipedia informing me that NJ has its own sales tax didn’t help matters. Gosh, really? I’ve never bought anything here ever in my life and hadn’t realized. SO helpful.) My verdict on Adorama? Great camera and very prompt service which I appreciated and can’t fault, but their follow-through and customer service?? Oy. Awful.

Which just goes to show–it doesn’t matter how good a service you provide, how well you fulfill that service IF you don’t back it up with a professional appearance. Good grammar may not be the most important thing in the world, but just like a clean appearance, a friendly smile, and decent manners … its absence sticks out like a sore thumb, and that’s what people are going to remember. Years from now, I might remember how quickly I got my camera in the mail, but I will absolutely remember the terrible e-mail I got from customer service. Not only that, but if I needed to place another camera order right now? I’d be more inclined to patronize a company whose employees show a reasonable grasp of the language.

You might say, but didn’t this employee got her point across? Yes, she did, but she left a bad impression. If there had been one typo in there, I would have chalked it up to a simple error. Everyone makes mistakes, and people are busy, yes, yes, but with this many? Not to mention the sloppy visual of the bad typing with double spaces between words, and the multiple colors? Not very professional.

And that is exactly the point. End of lesson.

As a purely side note, because I’m a good daughter, I’m attaching a link here to my father’s website, InhaleNow.com. He started it because he’d been looking for air purifiers to help with my asthma (because he’s a good dad). Providing a link was the least I could do, since, you know, I love him and all. Go take a look!

We will now resume our regularly scheduled programming.

Seen in the wild:

This sign so incensed my sister, she went back and took a picture just for us. See it? It asks, “Have alot of square footage?”

This is a simple one, folks. “Alot” is not a word, unless you are referring to that little town in India.

When talking or writing about a “considerable quantity or extent,” it is correctly written as “a lot,” two words.

If you need further memory aids, as this site humorously points out, “You shouldn’t write ‘alittle’ either.” (At least, I hope he meant it humorously. I can’t say I’ve ever seen “alittle” in writing, but maybe I’ve missed something?)

I was visited by the Language Log yesterday, and it was not a friendly visit. Back in 2007, I wrote about the venerable Strunk and White grammar book, and in that post mentioned in passing that the authors were against split infinitives. Geoffrey Pullum, in his post yesterday, was apparently saddened by this since that was not, in fact, one of the rules Strunk and White insisted upon. Then he implied that I was professing admiration for a book that I hadn’t actually read–or had not read carefully.

With all due respect to Mr. Pullum, I have read the book, many times. However, the last time I read it through, cover to cover, was on August 5, 1996. (Yes, I keep a reading list.) I have about 100 grammar, usage, style, and writing books, and can’t always remember where I’ve read a certain rule–especially when it’s one like split-infinitives that crops up over and over again. (One example of such, from Karen Elizabeth Gordon, is pictured to the left.)

Now, I’ve never claimed to be an expert on grammar. I write about it, yes, and I try to be as precise as I can be because I love the subject and don’t want to pass along misinformation. You don’t need a Doctorate of Writing to be able to write, though, nor do you need to be an Ansel Adams to recognize a great photograph–or to take great snapshots. I realize that blogging about grammar therefore opens me up to criticism by the experts when I make a mistake.

What irks me, though, is that he took one, small, relatively unimportant element from a review and used it as a focus for an entire post about people (in this case, me) not knowing about split infinitives. If the post had been about split infinitives (which I’ve also written), this would have been entirely fair, but it wasn’t. This was like reading an article praising the Beatles, detailing all the reasons their music was so ground-breaking and definitive, but then tearing it apart because the author mistakenly said that “Hey Jude” was on the “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. A mistake that should not have happened, but one which hardly negates the rest of the article. I might have mistakenly used an incorrect example in my list, but that doesn’t mean that I was wrong about everything–just that I attributed a statement to one book that was made in (many) other books. To continue that example, it’s like that imaginary writer being lambasted for not understanding that “Hey Jude” was inspired by Paul McCartney’s efforts to cheer up Julian Lennon … when that had nothing to do with the original article about the Beatles as a band.

So, the lesson learned from this? Well, I could stop blogging about writing altogether, but that seems extreme. I could have left a protesting comment over on the Language Log, but the comments on that post were closed. Not to mention the lesson of the importance of taking things in context. Really, though, the best decision is just to shrug it off, right? Because that’s what civilized people do. And, at least Mr. Pullum acknowledges that I am, “…truly concerned about usage and punctuation and so on.” I suppose that’s something.

Am I being too thin-skinned here? Or am I being too nicely magnanimous? Opinions?